This course is organized around one of the late twentieth century's most challenging intellectual and practical puzzles, a puzzle that challenges the core of the interstate legal order's foundations in state sovereignty. Initiating and sustaining effective international responses to threats to human security require the integrated engagement of nonstate entities with state entities at and across all levels.

Yet the foundation of the UN system in the principle of the inviolability of state sovereignty greatly constrains and inhibits UN agencies from engaging civic and subnational state entities constructively. In this context emerges an overriding challenge: how to generate and sustain effective cooperation both horizontally across differing autonomous organizational domains, legal jurisdictions, and sectors of society and vertically across time as well as across different levels of social aggregation from the micro level of individuals in their roles in groups, organizations, and communities to the macro level of representative governance in international forums.

The course will have six interrelated parts.

The course will be conducted in a mixed format, including lectures, discussion groups, a research concept paper, a syllabus construction project, an Internet exercise, two brief written reaction review essays on the readings and discussions for selected topics of the course, and a role playing/simulation exercise. Each participant will be assigned one or more faculty mentors with whom to work during the term.